Word: gogol
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...they all seemed to have known one another personally. Every Russian author was constantly cross-referencing, borrowing, comparing himself with the past. He would carry on a conversation, in his own art, with his literary ancestors. Every writer became the sum of all the writers who came before him: Gogol absorbing Pushkin, Dostoevsky absorbing both Gogol and Pushkin...
...hated Dostoevsky. Nabokov is at his most provocative when he ranks the great Russians. Most of his own emotions, it seems, were poured into his worshipping of Tolstoy, on the one hand, and his vicious debunking of Dostoevsky, on the other. The final ranking is, officially: 1. Tolstoy; 2. Gogol; 3. Chekhov; 4. Turgenev. Dostoevsky is dead last. Nabokov accuses him of sloppy and melodramatic Christianity, reactionary slavophilism (which Nabokov links with both Fascism and Communism), lack of artistic sense or taste, and a hackneyed, long-winded style. He doesn't have much to say about the works themselves...
...Crystal Palace as a cultural rallying point, as something more than a mere "journalistic" symbol. Most of all, Nabokov seems insensitive to Dostoevsky's vast and sympathetic humanity--a quality he singles out and apotheosizes in Tolstoy. How indeed can Nabokov hate a novelist who owed so much to Gogol, and who was so close in spirit to Tolstoy...
...another candidate must be added to that list: Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which resurfaced last week in San Francisco. The composer's second and last opera - his first was the bitingly satirical The Nose (1928), based on a story by Gogol - has had a checkered history. Completed in 1932, hailed as a major achievement at its premiere in 1934, condemned by Stalin in 1936 and sanitized 20 years later as Katerina Ismailova, the opera electrified its first audiences in both Russia and the West with its sexual frankness. One early critic, referring to the lascivious...
...Inspector General, directed by Peter Sellars '80. In his best--and last--production here, Sellars picked up the stone of politically-influenced readings of Gogol's play and found a bed of grotesque worms and grubs underneath. Sellars made Gogol's townspeople universal types of small-mindedness, highlighted by every variety of physical and spiritual deformity. And he did so through an almost too-painstaking devotion to his author's words: the new translation he used rendered literally Gogol's Russian folk adages and gnarled figures of speech. The translation missed occasionally and frequently hit--but the production cannot...